Caretaker - L. A. Graf [43]
Tuvok paused a painfully proper four steps into the room, his hands laced contritely behind his back. Over his shoulder, Janeway caught the briefest glimpse of the darkened, damaged bridge before the doors whisked shut and hid the image away. Had he been working out there all alone? This late at night? She wondered sometimes if Vulcans ever slept.
"Captain," he reported formally, "I have observed something peculiar about the pulses. They are getting faster."
She sat a little straighter. "Faster?"
Tuvok dipped a single nod. "The interval between each pulse has decreased by point-four-seven seconds since we arrived. I can offer no explanation."
She laughed a little--a dark, frustrated laugh that she didn't like the sound of much--and waved him forward to join her.
"That's only one of the mysteries we're dealing with, Mr. Tuvok.
Look at this." Turning her monitor to include them both, she leaned discreetly to one side so that Tuvok could bend over her shoulder without risking the unseemly possibility of physical contact. Janeway had heard rumors during her career about why Vulcans eschewed even casually touching humans, but had never been sure quite what to believe. All she knew was that Tuvok was always quietly consistent about maintaining what he considered an appropriate distance, and she had no intention of violating that.
He watched the planetary diagram spin beneath the glowing line of her words, the Array's dramatic flashes reduced by equations to little more than a series of short lines passing between Voyager's current position and the planet's surface. Janeway reached up to tap the planet's statistics. "It's virtually a desert--the whole planet. Not one ocean, not one river." She sat back again, shaking her head. "It has all the basic characteristics of an M-class planet, except..." This time, she chose a particular string of figures out of the planet's description, and blew them up to fill nearly half the screen.
"... there are no nucleogenic particles in the atmosphere."
Tuvok glanced down at her, one eyebrow arched. "That would mean the planet is incapable of producing clouds and rain."
Janeway nodded, chewing her lip. "I've studied thousands of M-class planets--I've never seen an atmosphere without nucleogenics. There must have been some kind of extraordinary environmental disaster." A yawn captured her suddenly, and she hid it behind a vigorous face scrubbing. "As soon as repairs are complete," she continued when her voice was back, "we'll set a course for the fifth planet."
"Captain, you require sleep."
She felt a blush push into her face--embarrassment at being caught in a lie, frustration at being caught in weakness--and reached for her waiting data padd without looking up at the Vulcan's calm face. "Kim's mother called me just after he left Earth... a delightful woman..."
She paged through the data in front of her blindly. "Her only son."
The words were even harder to say than to think. "He'd left his clarinet behind, and she wanted to know if she had time to send it.
... I had to tell her no." She glanced up at Tuvok without meaning to.
"Did you know he played clarinet in the Juilliard Youth Symphony?"
Tuvok said nothing for a moment. Then, "I did not have the opportunity to meet Mr. Kim."
It sounded so final when he said it that way. As though he knew he'd never have the chance now. "I barely knew him," Janeway admitted. "I never seem to have the chance to get to know any of them. I have to take more time to do that." It was a good promise, one she knew she'd made to herself before this, on other ships, with other crew. "It's a fine crew," she